When I reviewed Copper, I mentioned how little I care for most episodic cop shows. The formula of catching a different bad guy every week is trite and unrealistic, and becomes painfully difficult to believe. Hell, some of those CSI shows are practically science fiction. But The Wire is the kind of television that lets us know cop shows can be awesome. There's no formula. There are no neat ribbon-tied endings. There's no needless drama or hair-raising feats of derring-do. There are cops who do their jobs, and there are bad guys who do their jobs,...
Monday, 31 December 2012
Sunday, 30 December 2012
I recently conducted an extensive interview with the creators of Mage Wars to find out a little history behind the game. They told me that the game idea came from a 14-year-old boy who was looking through Playboy magazines and wondering what the girls would look like with magic undergarments and gnarly monsters. That horny teen mentioned to his father, who was a nerd, that he wished he could play a game where half-naked women fought awesome monsters...
Friday, 28 December 2012
If you're not a huge comics nerd (and I swear, I'm not… well, not any more), you may have missed Y: The Last Man. It's not a superhero book. In fact, there's almost nothing super about it. Some of the people are total bad-ass hard-ons, but for the most part, it's a story of regular people in irregular times.In the first issue of this incredible series, every living creature on the planet bearing a Y chromosome dies at the same time. They're talking,...
Thursday, 27 December 2012
Time is short tonight, so I'm going to tell you about a game that's short. Mostly because it's easier to write about short games, being as there's only so much you can say. The game is called Gauntlets of Fools, and it's 20 minutes of laughing and getting stomped by terrifically dangerous monsters. You need at least three people to play this madcap romp, but to really experience the wackiness, you'll want more than that. So basically, if you're at...
Sunday, 23 December 2012
I actually had a really long anti-Christmas rant written already. I was going to complain about how Christmas is too commercialized, like I was some kind of wise man pointing out what everyone in the freaking civilized world already knows. But then I realized that I don't have a single useful thing to say that everyone hasn't heard a hundred times since Thanksgiving, and I decided to go another way and tell you why I had a good night. Amazon has this cool service called Prime, the main feature of which is fast, free shipping all the time. But a...
Friday, 21 December 2012
I tend to get Running Man and Total Recall confused. Both are dystopic-future sci-fi flicks with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and both have wacky cool tech like exploding neck collars or Martian terraformers. I don't have any trouble remembering which movie has the hooker with three boobs, though.The new Total Recall doesn't help any. Aside from a few overlapping details (for instance, the triple-nipple streetwalker is in the new one, too), the old Arnold movie and the new Colin Farrell version are really not very similar at all. The names are largely...
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
The battle had raged for hours. Unity, The Fanatic, Tempest and Absolute Zero had finally found Citizen Dawn and her super-powered followers in the primal jungles of the forgotten land, and the casualties were steep on both sides. Unity had fallen to a pack of blood-hungry velociraptors and Tempest was badly burned by a volcanic river of lava. But now Dawn was badly weakened, and her minions lay defeated all around her. The Fanatic bravely sacrificed...
Saturday, 15 December 2012
I had a review I intended to write tonight. It was even about a game. But then I got home from work yesterday and all the news would show us was scenes from the mass murder in a Connecticut elementary school, and then I started talking about it with some friends and my wife, and it got me riled up.The first thing that got me cranky was that the first topic that pops up is gun control. And it's not just those sissy Democrats, either - one side starts saying how guns should be properly controlled to stop this kind of thing, and the other side starts...
Thursday, 13 December 2012
The zombie-game craze has to end sometime, and I hope it ends soon. Too many games about the shambling dead have begun to clog up the gaming pipeline like an undead deuce in a low-flow crapper. But I am really glad that before the whole phenomenon comes crashing down around us, we can run out and get Zombicide, because even in a market flooded by crappy zombie games, there's room to shine.Zombicide is a cooperative game about fighting the groaning...
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
I'm a fairly shallow guy. I like sci-fi movies, superhero movies, tough-guy-shooting-people movies, and mob movies (only when I was a kid, we called them gangster movies, but we can't anymore because now that doesn't mean Al Capone, it means guys who buy pants that don't fit). So when I saw the trailer for Lawless, I was like, 'hey, that looks cool!' even though it had Shia LeDoof, and I freaking hate that guy.I should have taken a hint from the...
Sunday, 9 December 2012
[Spoiler alert. I won't spoil Dark Knight Returns, exactly, but I'm assuming you've seen the two movies before this one. Because if you're a nerd, you should have seen that one by now.] If I had never seen The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises might have been the best superhero movie I ever saw. But I did. So it's not. And actually, The Dark Knight was also pretty damned good. But still not as good as Avengers. I have to stop before I start handing out...
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
I don't feel like writing. Just read this review, because everything I could say about the base game applies to Shadows:http://drakesflames.blogspot.com/2011/01/chip-game-review-puzzle-strike.htmlHa ha! Just kidding! I would not be that lazy with a game review! You deserve more. Also, my guy at Game Salute would get pissed and quit sending me review copies. That's the real reason.So hopefully by now you've read the original Puzzle Strike review....
Monday, 3 December 2012
OK, I've held off long enough. I was all, 'everybody has already seen The Walking Dead. We don't need a review of a show that anyone with two brain cells is already watching.' And then the mid-season finale was last night, and I was all, 'holy crap, this show is the best frikkin show ever,' and lost all restraint in my need to talk about how awesome The Walking Dead is.I'll get this out of the way first - I'm not reviewing the comic book. Seriously,...
Saturday, 1 December 2012
My parents were very, very Christian. The first time I saw an R-rated movie, I was 17 years old. They didn't want to let me see Back to the Future because they heard that the mom has a crush on her son (which was true, but it was 1950s mom and 1980s son, so that was OK). I once had to leave a party because my friends decided to watch Commando, and I was not allowed.But my old man had a weak spot - kick-ass sci-fi. The exception to the R-rated movie thing was when there was an awesome science fiction flick we could rent from Wherehouse (you might...
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
I used to start every day by reading through my daily dose of web comics. Most of them were just for the sake of the joke, but my favorite was a story-based daily called Schlock Mercenary. The art was weak, but the stories were great, the characters were interesting, and the dialog was outstanding. It was about a roving band of space mercs, focusing in particular on a green goo alien named Schlock who shot things with a plasma cannon and ate a lot...
Sunday, 25 November 2012
We need to start a campaign to stop ugly games. We'll have an online petition and send letters to our state representatives. The petition will be something like, 'We hereby do swear to talk like lawyers as we ask for a law that will make people stop producing ugly games.' This is necessary because there are just too many ugly games out there, and some of them might be fun, except for they are so darn ugly.Case in point - Down In Flames. It's a card...
Friday, 23 November 2012
I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got stuck at a relative's house after a really long, exhausting drive, then got to eat tons of overcooked, dry turkey and listen to your cousins fights over whether Obama is actually from Kenya. My Thanksgiving was WAY better than that, mostly because we had it at home and nobody came over. That's not entirely accurate, actually. My daughter did have a friend over, so I shared my dry-ass Thanksgiving turkey with two giggling, insipid sixteen-year-old twits. Then, after dinner, this little girl...
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
Ask the average American what the Civil War was about, and they might tell you slavery. Some (especially throwback rednecks who think the South should rise again, as if that would be anything other than completely disastrous) might tell you it was just about Northern Aggression. Ask a tweed-jockey academic, he might just tell you all about how it was about the rise of industrialism and the decline of agrarianism. But they're all wrong - it was about...
Sunday, 18 November 2012
Asmodee understands that theme is important for gamers. That's why, when they make a game, they use the same exact theme for every fourth game. Settling the New World from Europe may have been done about seven hundred times, but people keep buying it, so it must still be popular.Archipelago is a game about settling a bunch of islands in the middle of the Caribbean. It covers a wide span of time - each turn is supposed to be about fifteen years, which...
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